Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, who returned from his vacat– er, physical therapy in Austria for all of ten days to deal with the ecological disaster that was his city — you know, toxic smoke tightly swaddling the capital (it has since lifted, but it still smells like campfire in the mornings), skyrocketing death toll and packed morgues (I now know one of the victims, who couldn’t be buried for several days because of the backlog)–

Let me start that sentence over.

Mayor Luzhkov is going back on vacation now that the fire situation around Moscow has stabilized (it has). This coincides with Emergency Ministry officials starting to talk about maybe lifting the state of emergency that was declared on August 2, six days before Mayor Luzhkov so gracefully returned from vacation.